A retrospective of Ram Kumar’s works

A retrospective of veteran artist Ram Kumar takes place at Aicon Gallery, London. Art historian Partha Mitter has stated that the ‘common thread’ that binds modern Indian art is ‘the insistent return of the figure, the country’s perennial subject, set against the backdrop of abstraction.’ One of the most long-standing and seminal exceptions to this norm is Ram Kumar.

Although he, like many Indian as well as Pakistani artists who studied art in Paris, returned with a semi-figurative style drawing on post-cubism, he chose to abandon the figure and worked almost exclusively around the abstract cityscape – its intensity conveying urban alienation - a motif unique among his contemporaries at that point of time. This move took place in a series of works inspired by the holy city of Benares, variously rendered as an amalgamation of textures and shades, or as the art scholar notes, ‘the colorful city reduced to stretches of clay, sand & sky.’

In the 1960s, the artist witnessed another marked shift in his practice, this time moving away from the cityscape, towards the peculiar natural abstract landscape. Increasingly his paintings would be comprised of forms that were detached from his earlier conventional figure-ground relationship that coalesced in the middle distance to allude to a landscape. This changed focus on the abstract landscape, driven by Benares, led him to pursue it, for the rest of his career, almost exclusively.

Pure abstraction is rare in the paintings of Indian artists, as a press release notes. Many of them, who did experiment with abstraction, soon went back to the figure to some extent. Ram Kumar's paintings, tough to place within the more simplistic narratives developed around modern Indian art, demands something most of his contemporaries cannot; a very private and contemplative viewing experience.

They are less about transcendence and present themselves as the vivacious visual encounter between viewers and the paintings. The evolution in his work continues to set him apart from other artists of his era.